Age, Part 3

The final section of this little essay on aging. I will say that aging is one of those things in life we cannot speak knowingly about when we're young. Duh, you say, but many young people think they know what aging is about. But here's something from an "older" person, a friend of mine--who is 78, doesn't look it, and is still working in the federal attorney's office. She says this of aging, "It's a dirty trick."
Obviously, at age 44, when I wrote the essay I've posted here, I thought I was old, and I thought I knew something. Now I know I was young and was only guessing. But that's life. Lots of guessing. Right?

Part 3  

When do we know we're old?  If we're young inside, and he was, must we admit to being old because others see us that way?  because our bodies insist we are?  Age brings its benefits; we really do know more old than we did young.  But mostly what it does is bring us up short when we catch those unplanned-for glimpses of ourselves in the mirror.  "Oh!  Is that what I look like?"  I know I'm not 19 or even 39 anymore.  I can even put the number on it--44.  And I don't mind being it as much as verbally owning up to it.  But inside me there is no age, and there is always the feeling--is it fantasy?--that I am young.  At the same time, I know the urgency one feels at this age, the need to rush, to catch something before it is gone.

            The feelings I'm experiencing have earned a label.  Our culture calls them the mid-life crisis.  I am tagged.  I wear the label as prominently as Hester wore her A; it is in the color of my hair, in the lines under my eyes.  It goes with me into the college classroom where I am one of the "mature" students.  For my dad, society's tag was old age.  Imagine an 89-year old man wanting to buy an artichoke farm.  In either case, with or without the label, the aging process does not relent.

            In the autobiographical story, Coming Out of the Ice, Victor Herman, who has spent 10 years in Soviet prisons, is now free.  He sits in front of the mirror in a barber shop and watches the haircut and shave he has waited 10 years for.  When it is done, his face, clean and bare of its beard, wears now a look of sadness, of disappointment.  We are confused.  Shouldn't he feel a luxurious, joyful sense of relief, a renewal of life?  The young woman who has done the barbering sees his disappointment, and she asks our "why?".  He answers simply, "I thought I was younger."

            We feel the poignancy of his reply, and we suffer with it.  Yes, we have suffered with him through his torture and beatings and isolation.  But at that moment, I think we hurt for ourselves as well as for Victor.   We have not been 10 years in a Soviet prison.  But we have known those quiet, private moments when we see that life is passing more quickly than we can keep track of, and we sense having lost somewhere a chunk of time, a piece of our own life.  We have had those brief shocking glimpses when we must face our own aging.

            I don't always know how old I look.  Older than I want.  But it doesn't matter; I'm younger than that.  My dad was old, and his years, his eyes, his body marked him old, as he spoke his dream of Watsonville and artichokes.  But my dad was younger than that.